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It has been interesting to read bloggers experimenting with the beta by recreating their small real life cities to recreate traffic conditions in the game with success. And the agent system is broken in a way and no one person actually lives in house 101 and works in commercial building 203 everyday. First come first serve society.

Nah. I'd say anyone who thinks always on DRM is a huge issue doesn't have any real problems in their lives, which I guess is good. Or, they don't have life outside gaming, which I guess is bad. Overreact much and all that.

So it seems being worried about my favourite hobby means I don't have a life, which is basically what you are implying.

Let's put it this way then.
I really like playing video games and I don't have an internet connection at home, meaning I can't play certain games and in the future I probably won't be able to play many more, specially if there's more people like you who seem ok with it and think people who are against always on DRM don't have a life outside gaming and are overreacting.

That's not my case but I know a lot of people who can't afford a reliable internet connection or even an internet connection at all and usually purchase games that are in the bargain bin or at much reduced prices. Sim city will almost certainly never end up in the bargain bin, and you know why ? Because in a couple of years EA will have probably disabled the sim city servers meaning no one can play, with or without an internet connection and that includes anyone who paid its asking price of 60€ on it.
But that's absolutely fair and everyone should totally be ok with it.

I cannot remember if I had this bug on install (I installed it over 4 years ago :P ), I had a shadows bug which was fixed by turning off the shadow buffer (not needed now, the GPU is so fast it does not need it in a 2d game).

Why mess with all the OS when you can config only the game exe (trough shortcut parameters) ?http://simcityforum.com/showthread.php?t=848-CPUCount:X (where X is the number of CPU cores to use) This is an important option on multi-core systems, especially if you are having crashing to desktop issues with Windows Vista or Win7. Setting to one core (-CPUCount:1) could resolve your issues. Also this can keep SimCity on one core while other processes use your other cores. This can be especially useful if you have dual monitors and want to run SimCity on one monitor while you do other stuff on your other monitor.

Looks to me like mass drink driving, in search of the first human shelters for the head to hit the pillow.

But that made me do a route query in SC4.

Mmmmmnope, nothing alike.
It's like SC4 is the new, evolved release.

Apropos:

Originally Posted by Cooper

Remember: One road only.
From everything I have seen / read multiple roads: grids or otherwise, is a recipie for headache because of the agent-system the game uses.

Cooper was, of course, speaking about SC.

Originally Posted by Nalano

Pharaoh took its agent mechanics from Caesar 3 (15 years!) and solved the randomness problem by adding traffic cones on the roads by which those merchants/servants et al couldn't wander past but characters with a specific destination could.

Without them, towns in Pharaoh would have looked like towns in Caesar 3, within which the most efficient models were those with zero intersections - just one long windy road.

We were talking about that before anyone (except the editors) had access to the game.
Turns out that SC has exactly the same dumb agent mechanics as the 15 year old Caesar 3.

Talking about evolution, right?
1998 vs 2013. Or the other way around...

So I don't feel like going through 47 pages of this thread, but is this game actually as bad as the internet is saying? I never planned on buying it anyway because always online and Origin, but I do enjoy watching things burn.

So I don't feel like going through 47 pages of this thread, but is this game actually as bad as the internet is saying? I never planned on buying it anyway because always online and Origin, but I do enjoy watching things burn.

It's much worse, actually. It's not a fix list of fails but an evolving, seems never ending, list of fails.
Every time we thought we've seen the last broken thing in it something else comes up and leaves us speechless.

So I don't feel like going through 47 pages of this thread, but is this game actually as bad as the internet is saying? I never planned on buying it anyway because always online and Origin, but I do enjoy watching things burn.

It depends on what you expect. If you're looking for a modern iteration of Sim City 4, then no, you would most likely be disappointed. The new version is much more like the original game, although with a greater emphasis on resource conservation and multi-city cooperation. If you take issue with mandatory online connectivity, you might as well grab your popcorn and pull up a chair.

X_kot, you might have revealed the only thing EA did right on this game.
The naming.

SimCity is the prequel to all the later, improved versions. ^^
It's run by a somehow contemporary game engine (glassbox, with a net cable permanently stuck up it's back parts) but it's about the early stages of the development of the game.

Complete (pseudo-)randomness of agent-based movement (for "sims") would be both a) better at moving sims about and b) more akin to an actual city as exists now.

If when leaving work every sim was assigned, at random, a house to try returning to then you would not have the "conga line home" that currently exists. Same when leaving for work and shopping.

There would still be occasions when a sim would turn up at a destination to find it full and have to move to another one. But they would not all turn up at the same location to find it full in serial.

Thus it would be more efficient than the current serial agent-movement system. It would also be more of a simulation of an actual city. Higher density areas would have higher traffic as there are more homes/industries to go to and thus there is a greater chance that a sim will be randomly allocated a high density destination as their target. It would avoid sims travelling through a nearby but low-density residential area on the way home if it's not actually on the route to the high density area.

tl,dr:
Random decision making is a better simulation than the nonsense Maxis came up with.

So I don't feel like going through 47 pages of this thread, but is this game actually as bad as the internet is saying? I never planned on buying it anyway because always online and Origin, but I do enjoy watching things burn.

Yes and no. I'm enjoying it for the most part but the strange agent behaviour (revealed today to be a sim-level problem because Maxis are stupid) leads to some ridiculous situations where roads are clogged and industry/commercial sectors fail for no good reason. I'd been noticing that business or industry would start complaining about having no workers and this revelation about how screwed up the agent system currently is has revealed why.

If they fix it (and I don't see why they can't) I'd still recommend it as a game, because general consensus is that it's quite fun. The agent problems become apparent with larger cities though, which explains why "cities" are so small. Whatever happens though the problems with DRM will overshadow the game forever.

Originally Posted by tadada

X_kot, you might have revealed the only thing EA did right on this game.
The naming.

Wait, so now EA are responsible for Maxis having a ridiculous agent system? Rubbish, argue about the DRM/MP stuff if you must, but this is an engine-level screwup and it's clearly Maxis' fault. Nobody at EA would have told them to fudge the agent behaviour, the programmers came up with this idea.

Nalano's Law - As an online gaming discussion regarding restrictions grows longer, the probability of a post likening the topic to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea approaches one.
Soldant's Law - A person will happily suspend their moral values if they can express moral outrage by doing so.